Perspective Analysis for Online Debates

Internet and social media devices created a new public space for online debate on political and social topics. A debate is defined as a formal discussion on a set of related topics in a public meeting, in which opposing perspectives and arguments are put forward. In this paper, we develop automated perspective discovery techniques which would contribute to the understanding of features (i.e. social, political, cultural, religious beliefs, goals, and practices) shared by each side of the debate. Secondly, we show that, compared to a semi-automated process, our perspective discovery algorithms not only identify larger number of relevant features, but they also yield a higher accuracy scaling of moderate to extreme organizations on both sides of a debate.